Formative Fictions

Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman

Tobias Boes

• Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780801465215
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Bildungsroman, or "novel of formation, " has long led a paradoxical life within literary studies, having been construed both as a peculiarly German genre, a marker of that country's cultural difference from Western Europe, and as a universal expression of modernity. In Formative Fictions, Tobias Boes argues that the dual status of the Bildungsroman renders this novelistic form an elegant way to negotiate the diverging critical discourses surrounding national and world literature.

Since the late eighteenth century, authors have employed the story of a protagonist's journey into maturity as a powerful tool with which to facilitate the creation of national communities among their readers. Such attempts always stumble over what Boes calls "cosmopolitan remainders, " identity claims that resist nationalism's aim for closure in the normative regime of the nation-state. These cosmopolitan remainders are responsible for the curiously hesitant endings of so many novels of formation.

In Formative Fictions, Boes presents readings of a number of novels—Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Karl Leberecht Immermann's The Epigones, Gustav Freytag's Debit and Credit, Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus among them—that have always been felt to be particularly "German" and compares them with novels by such authors as George Eliot and James Joyce to show that what seem to be markers of national particularity can productively be read as topics of world literature.

PART I

METHODOLOGICAL BACKGROUND

1

THE LIMITS OF NATIONAL FORM: NORMATIVITY AND PERFORMATIVITY IN BILDUNGSROMAN CRITICISM

When Morgenstern gave his Bildungsroman lecture in Dorpat, he could not know that roughly seven hundred miles to the west, another academic who was his exact contemporary was working on the first (and some would say the only) great aesthetic theory of the nineteenth century. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Morgenstern were born within one day of one another, but though briefly joined by this historical coincidence their lives followed different trajectories ever after. Morgenstern’s career took him further and further toward geographical and intellectual obscurity when he accepted job offers in Danzig and Dorpat. Hegel, on the other hand, enjoyed increasing renown in Jena, Nuremberg, and Heidelberg and in 1818 was offered Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s former chair in philosophy at the University of Berlin. It was here, at the center of German political life, that Hegel began giving his lectures on aesthetics during the winter of 1820–21.

Hegel was far from the first German intellectual to reflect on the status of the new literary form that had come into being in the twenty-five years since the publication of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.1 But he was the first to integrate his thoughts into a systematic theory of aesthetics. Eighteenth-century theorists of the novel, such as Friedrich von Blanckenburg, took an essentially rhetorical approach to their task: they tried to give a technical account of how the new genre worked, how it differed from established literary forms such as the epic or the drama, and how aspiring writers might produce successful novels of their own. For Hegel, by contrast, novels (and indeed artistic objects of any kind) were interesting not in and of themselves, but because of the service they provided to systematic philosophy, whose ultimate task was to trace the unfolding of world spirit. As he puts it at the very outset of his lectures, “Art liberates the true content of phenomena from the pure appearance and deception of this bad, transitory world, and gives them a higher actuality, born of the spirit.”2

Poetic literature (Poesie) occupies a privileged position in Hegel’s aesthetic system, because it is uniquely suited to mediate between the “content” and “artistic form” of the external world, imposing on both the necessary sense of closure or “totality” that is a precondition for ascent into the world of the spirit.3 In his discussion of poetic literature, however, Hegel formulates a crucial distinction between the ancient Greek epic and the novel, which he terms “a modern bourgeois epic” (2:1092). The former encounters totality as an external given, in the “total world of a nation and epoch” (2:1044); the latter, on the other hand, takes as its subject the collision between the “poetry of the heart and the opposing prose of external circumstances” (2:1092). To illustrate what Hegel has in mind, it is useful to contrast Homer’s Achilles with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. Achilles’ life is characterized by a fundamental congruity between form and content: he is a warrior, and all his actions can be related to this basic fact. At the same time, his destiny is inseparable from that of the people whom he leads, and it would have never occurred to an ancient bard to question whether Achilles might perhaps better serve the Achaians by being something other than he actually is. By contrast, Wilhelm Meister’s nature and calling are far from clear throughout much of his development. He believes himself to be born for the theater, and most of Goethe’s plot is given over to a series of trials in which this belief collides with the actual life of an actor. How Meister’s life relates to that of the people around him is also far from certain, and the novel tries out various forms of the social contract before eventually giving preference to the Tower Society.

In Hegel’s novel theory, then, totality does not exist as something that is pre-given. Instead, it comes about over the course of the work as the protagonist struggles for a compromise between the poetic form within and the prosaic reality without. This process is teleological, because everything that happens finds its ultimate justification in the endpoint of the narrative. In Hegel’s words, “In the modern world [the hero’s] struggles are nothing more than years of apprenticeship [Lehrjahre]…and thereby acquire their true significance” (1:593).4 The very next sentence makes clear, however, that Hegel regards this “true significance” with great skepticism, judging it as falling short of a true reconciliation between poetic form and prosaic content. More often than not, he claims, the protagonist will simply submit to the pressures of external reality: “The end of such apprenticeship consists in this, that the subject sows his wild oats, accommodates himself with his wishes and opinions to existing relationships and their rationality, enters the concatenation of the world, and acquires for himself an appropriate attitude to it” (1:593).

Hegel remained skeptical of the novel because, unlike the classical epic with its divine, semidivine, or at least nobly born heroes, the novel is condemned to search for a redemptive totality in the life of a more or less random individual. It can therefore offer only a “subjective” perspective on the world. An “objective” perspective that would have universal meaning is reserved for the philosophical sciences, which is why “poetry [appears] as that particular art in which art itself begins at the same time to dissolve and acquire in the eyes of philosophy its point of transition to religious pictorial thinking as such, as well as to the prose of scientific thought” (2:968). Indeed, it is by now a bit of a critical commonplace to refer to various other parts of Hegel’s philosophical system, especially the Phenomenology of Mind, as a “Bildungsroman of the spirit.”5

The three characteristics of Hegel’s novel theory that I have just outlined (the search for totality in the life of an individual, the staging of this struggle in a teleological narrative, and the yearning for an objective supplement to the merely subjective totality supplied by artistic description) all tie his aesthetic system to the philosophical concept of Bildung as it was articulated in German idealism during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.6 In the second chapter of this book, I will outline a revisionist model of Bildung that detaches it from its idealist interpretations and restores it to its roots in the mid-eighteenth century. First, however, I will outline how an implicit commitment to totality, teleology, and normativity has shaped the critical discourse on the Bildungsroman for the past two centuries, and what an alternate approach to the genre might look like. On the basis of such an alternate model, I will then develop some larger hypotheses about the purpose of literary study, and derive from them some methodological strictures that I intend to follow in this book.

Novel Criticism and the “Unchanging Unity of the Ideal”

One of the foundational texts for all idealist theories of Bildung is Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, published in 1795, the year that also saw the publication of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. In the fourth letter of this collection, Schiller argues that “every individual human being…carries within him, potentially and prescriptively, an ideal man, the archetype of a human being, and it is his life’s task to be, through all his changing manifestations, in harmony with the unchanging unity of this ideal.”7 This statement expresses two of the three characteristics that I highlighted about Hegel’s aesthetic theory: that all human beings carry within themselves the prescription for an “ideal” existence, and that the realization of this ideal presents itself teleologically, as a “life’s task.” Soon after, Schiller addresses the third characteristic as well, providing an “objective form” to complement the merely subjective dimensions of Bildung: “This archetype, which is to be discerned more or less clearly in every individual, is represented by the state, the objective and, as it were, canonical form in which all the diversity of individual subjects strive to unite” (93). Already in Schiller’s account then, written at a time when Germany was still paralyzed by the provincial sectionalism of the Holy Roman Empire, the state emerges as the “objective and canonical” form of the inner potential of man. In order to achieve subjective completion, individual human beings must strive for some kind of “harmony” with its unalterable unity.

It quickly becomes apparent, however, that Schiller’s understanding of the state differs from our contemporary approach to the term. As he explains, the correspondence between individual subject and state can be achieved in one of two ways: “either by the ideal man suppressing empirical man, and the state annulling individuals; or else by the individual himself becoming the state, and man in time being ennobled to the stature of man as idea” (93, emphasis in original). The first of these possibilities (“the state annulling individuals”) emits an undeniably totalitarian odor, and present-day readers of Schiller will no doubt be reminded of Fascist Germany or Stalinist Russia by his claims that the diversity of human subjects invariably strives to gain a canonical form in the state. Schiller is well aware of the dangers that lie ahead down this road, and consequently advocates for the second alternative: “A political constitution will still be very imperfect if it is to achieve unity only by suppressing variety. The state should not only respect the objective and generic character in its individual subjects; it should also honor their subjective and specific character” (94). “Once man is inwardly at one with himself,” Schiller continues, “he will be able to preserve his individuality however much he may universalize his conduct, and the state will be merely the interpreter of his own finest instinct, a clearer formulation of his own sense of what is right” (94–95). The bulk of Schiller’s study is then concerned with elucidating how man might become “inwardly at one with himself” through a process of aesthetic education in which “sense impulse” (mutable life) and “form impulse” (eternal shape) are united with one another in a process of free play of the mental faculties.

The early reception history of Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man coincided with a tumultuous period in German history that witnessed, first, heated intellectual debates about the significance of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon, and then the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and the first stirrings of genuine nationalism during the Wars of Liberation. Schiller’s notion that human beings might give the law unto the state rather than vice versa if they only developed their inner faculties to a sufficient extent was quickly seized on by German intellectuals and developed into a programmatic alternative to the French Revolution. Almost immediately, this discourse also became linked with Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, a book that Goethe’s contemporaries now read not only as an exemplary depiction of a man’s aesthetic education, but also as a veiled political program.8 The romantics began writing novels in the Meister tradition, and as Todd Kontje has shown, almost all the enduring examples of their kind (e.g., Ludwig Tieck’s Franz Sternbald’s Wanderings [1798], Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen [1800], and Jean Paul’s The Awkward Age [Flegeljahre, 1804]) feature protagonists who seek to improve themselves through the medium of literature.9 As Kontje also remarks, however, the phase of optimistic trust in the possibilities of an aesthetic education—a Bildung that might discover its ideal purpose in literature—was comparatively short-lived. Already satirized in Jean Paul’s The Awkward Age, it was thoroughly deconstructed by E. T. A. Hoffmann in his The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr (1819–21).

Hegel’s lectures, with their distrust of literary description as a merely “subjective” realization of the ideal, can ...

Table of contents

• A Note on Translations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Methodological Background
• Part II Comparative Studies
• Conclusion: Apocalipsis cum figuris: Thomas Mann and the Bildungsroman at the Ends of Time
• Bibliography